A local spin on the laundries of shame

Jeanette Barnacle was just 10 when nuns at the Convent of the Good Shepherd in Oakleigh put her to work in their commercial laundry.

"They had to build a stool for me to stand on so I could reach the tables," she says of the start of a four-and-a-half year period in which she ironed linen from that first day, July 13, 1950.

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"There was a huge room with long tables and there were pipes going down with rubber hoses," says Mrs Barnacle. "It was a gas iron."

By far the youngest held there, she had been adopted at birth but was later placed in several homes, including an orphanage in Brighton and detained as a runaway at Royal Park.

"Uncontrollable they said I was," she says, laughing. "And still am."

From July 1950, Jeanette spent more than four years ironing linen at the laundry, which stood on what is now the site of the Chadstone Shopping Centre. Among the women there was the illegitimate daughter of a prominent Melbourne identity who "put her in (homes) never to be released".

She says she worked in a locked room. "The only place I was allowed was in the ironing room because there was no way out..."

At 65, her home is now a flat in a small town in NSW where she lives with her Siamese cat, Gemma. But Mrs Barnacle cannot forget the nights in a Melbourne convent dormitory with a screened area on a platform at one end, where a nun slept.

She does not know how many slept there. "At that stage, I could neither read, write, count or nothing," she says.

Mrs Barnacle can all but hear the bells that woke the women for prayers at 6am. She gestures to show you the awkward fit of rough calico underwear and screws her face at the memory of lumpy porridge for breakfast.

Toil at the gas iron was interrupted each midday "to do stations of the cross and then bread and dripping and back to work".

She has decided not to see a new film about Ireland's infamous Magdalene laundries, in which generations of women were incarcerated for reasons including pregnancy out of wedlock or because a parish priest deemed them to be in moral danger.

Now screening around Victoria, the film has been denounced by the Vatican as "libellous" and the US Catholic League has called on Miramax head Harvey Weinstein to be sacked.

Though warmly received by some, including favourable reviews on the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference website (www.catholic.org.au), its arrival in Australia prompted a letter from a parish priest in NSW to the distributors, Dendy Films, saying there was "quite enough anti-Catholic bigotry in this country" and "the poor nuns who gave their lives to providing others with a fresh start deserve better than the malice and lies of the immoral".

An estimated 30,000 women worked in the Irish laundries, the last of which closed as recently as 1996. The Good Shepherd laundries in Australia are believed to have remained open until the 1960s. It is not clear how strong the parallels are between the Irish and Australian laundry experiences. "The Magdalene Sisters is about Ireland and the Irish context," said Kate Graham, personal assistant to Good Shepherd provincial Sister Anne Dalton. "We have no comment."

She forwarded a statement by the provincialate saying the Good Shepherd sisters had provided "refuge and rehabilitation" for women and children in Australia and New Zealand since the 1860s.

It said they "acknowledge and regret instances of injustice and harm... in our former institutions"; and they were committed to promoting healing and reconciliation. It said the sisters would welcome contact from former residents of their institutions.

Jeanette Barnacle remembers an institution in which women were known not by name but by number - hers was 52 - and "you weren't allowed to look up or speak to anyone".

She says conditions were probably little known outside its walls. "When the government came out you weren't allowed to tell them anything or you'd get belted."

Harsh treatment was routine. "They used to belt you with wet towels. They shaved my head..."

Mrs Barnacle welcomes the Senate's vote last month for a national inquiry on the extent and legacy of abuse of up to 80,000 former state wards in government and church orphanages and foster homes between the 1920s and 1970s.

Leonie Sheedy, national secretary of the Care Leavers of Australia Network, a support group whose 340 members are former wards of state, says The Magdalene Sisters is "very harrowing for anyone who was raised in a children's home or orphanage".

Though Jeanette Barnacle won't see it, she hopes it helps others understand. "People should know about it because no one really knows unless you've been in there."